Word: sopranos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...first stated by the horn alone; admittedly it is a dirty trick to play on the unfortunate hornist, but it is a common enough practice, and this particular player was not up to it. He also succeeded in spoiling a large part of the orchestral accompaniment to the soprano in the Beethoven aria Primo amore, piacer del ciel. In the second half of the minuet in Haydn's Symphony No. 14, he not only had trouble in playing the correct intervals, but also played sharps where they were not written...
Then there was David Borden's aria for soprano and orchestra on Dylan Thomas's Force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age. There was no clear relationship between the music and the words. The poem invokes a myriad of very different images: plant metabolism, evaporation, the action of tide and wind, and time, the dripping of blood and the hanging of a man. The music pounded along its atonal course without proper variation in color for the different verses. Borden did demonstrate his sensitivity to the poem, once, with his treatment of the reiterated...
When in Rome, she does as she always does. There were some boos after the first act of a gala opening-night Norma in 1958, and Soprano Maria Callas stomped out without further ado. So the Rome Opera canceled her contract for three additional performances. Their mistake. The reason for her hasty exit, said La Callas, was a sore throat, and a Roman court that examined her medical certificates agreed. The opera management now has to honor her original contract and pay the diva $2,800 for the operas she didn't sing. With Callas, even silence is golden...
...Teresa Stratas is not yet the most famous soprano around, but standing a flat 5 feet, she is surely the smallest. Performance by performance, review by review, she has been inching to stardom. As Cherubino in the Metropolitan Opera's Marriage of Figaro last December and as Liu in Turandot, she won the kind of acclaim that prima donnas are made...
...virginal strumpet, Violetta, swept the packed house into a record 43 minutes of tumultuous applause. Raved the Süddeutsche Zeitung: "Stratas intuitively found everything that makes the part touching, the erotic flair of the doomed girl, the fire and despair of her heart. Her light, balanced soprano obeys each impulse: from tender lyricism to great dramatic explosion, from giddy parlando to dolorous espressivo, everything is luminescent and enchanting...